I have many wishes for the city where we live.

Amarillo is a wonderful city. It’s on the move. Its downtown district is undergoing a major makeover and will become a wonderful place to go for entertainment and business.

One of my wishes? It’s for Loop 335 to become an actual loop that circles the city of nearly 200,000 residents.

It is no such thing at the moment. It hasn’t been for, oh, several decades. Loop 335, aka Soncy Road on the city’s western border, has become just another busy street.

What is the state highway department planning for the loop?

Here’s what I understand.

The Texas Department of Transportation plans to extend the western corridor along Helium Road, about a mile west of Soncy. How far along is TxDOT in this endeavor?

My wife and I drove along Helium Road just the other day while running an errand. We found a gravel road from Hollywood Road north almost to Interstate 40. No work has yet begun on Helium.

Now, is there work ongoing on the loop? Yes. It’s occurring on the southern stretch of Loop 335 between Bell Street and Washington Street. TxDOT is turning the loop into what it calls a “limited access” highway.

The Soncy corridor needs lots of work.

We’ve been able to travel through a good bit of Texas during our three-plus decades living here. We’ve been to communities of Amarillo’s size and considerably smaller with actual loops that allow easy transport around those communities.

If a truck is eastbound on I-40 and must exit the freeway because it is carrying “hazardous cargo,” the driver must exit at Soncy — where he or she might choose to drive southbound through traffic that is choked often to a stop.

My wife and I will be long gone before the western loop extension is completed. We hope to return to visit frequently in the years to come. When we do, my hope is to see much of that interstate traffic diverted away from Soncy — and onto an extension that deserves the name Loop 335.

What we have now is nothing of the kind.